Petrol Sue, Jasper, Leah, Emrys and Dmitri – five of the new “fantasy” starter avatars. Credit: Linden Lab
On Thursday, September 1st, Linden Lab announced the release of a further set of ten new starter avatars.
Referred to as a set of “fantasy” inspired avatars, the new collection features five male and five female avatars based on the system avatar, but include mesh accessories. Two of the avatars are vampires, providing newcomers with the option to have such characters without having to opt for the fully mesh starter avies.
The ten avatars are paired off into five genres: the aforementioned vampire, plus magic (with an unabashed Harry Potter element to the male character of “Emrys”); cyber / sci-fi; post-apocalyptic (regulars at TPVD meetings may recognise “Petrol Sue”, as worn by Grumpity Linden at the meetings); and steampunk. All come with pets (or in the case of Leah and Jaxon, from the cyber / sci-fi theme, drones).
The Morgan avatar, one of the two “magic” themed avatars, and her familiar, Theo
Commenting on the new avatars, the blog post reads in part:
Over the years, we’ve continued to apply what we’ve learned about building techniques to our starter avatars, improving their aesthetics and optimizing them to load quickly. Our latest Fantasy starter avatars are vibrant examples of what we consider “balanced content” that is both performance-optimized and looks beautiful — they can save you time getting immersed in one of our many role-playing communities without unnecessarily lagging yourself or others. We know that content creators want to create optimized content for their customers, and we encourage creators to study these new avatars as examples of balanced content.
The blog post goes on to state that the avatars have been designed with Avatar Rendering Complexity in mind, and have been fine-tuned for “low ARC” scores. When testing on my system (i5 4590 with a GTx 970 GPU, the female avatars reported at between 8980 (“Leah”), through to 18,352 for “Petrol Sue”. The male avatars fell between 9,837 (“Emrys”) and 14,981 (“Jaxon”).
As with the last set of “system” (or “classic”) avatars (see here), these all use attached AOs, some of which continue to appear a little jerky during transitions (or lack thereof), suddenly flicking from one animation / pose to the next.
The new avatars can be accessed by going to Me (/Avatar) > Choose an Avatar > New Avatars (tab should be open by default). Once an avatar is selected, it is transferred to your inventory and worn.
To mark the release of the new avatars, the Lab also issued a promotional video:
I’ve been in an oriental frame of mind recently, hopping around regions with Japanese and Chinese flavours. I’ve been helped in this by a set of note cards put together by Sayu 白湯 (EmpressRoslyn Winslet), who is also one of the people involved in Little Yoshiwara on the mainland continent of Satori, which Caitlyn and I jumped over to visit one lunch time recently.
Founded in 2007 by Xuemei Yiyuan, and landscaped collaborative by Xuemei and Sayu, Little Yoshiwara is a combination of public, free-form role-play and residential environment modelled after the final years of the Edo period in Japan, which were referred to as Bakumatsu (幕末, literally meaning “closing curtain”), between (roughly) 1853 and 1867. These were tumultuous times for Japan, encompassing both internal strife and external interventions on the part of America, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (including the joint bombardment of Shimonoseki in 1864).
Given this, one might expect Little Yoshiwara to be perhaps leaning toward the militaristic in look and feel, but this is not the case at all. Instead, visitors find themselves in a region-wide environment (which actually spills into neighbouring Ribush to the south and connects with two parcels in Chodron to the west), given over to a range of cultural aspects of traditional Japanese life. Through the town, one can find a wide range of classes covering geisha, samurai and shinto traditions, together with classes for those interested in learning about Kabuki (歌舞伎), the classical Japanese dance-drama.
What is particularly pleasing about Little Yoshiwara is the very natural layout: public buildings and classrooms intermingle with private residences; houses rubs shoulders with farm small holdings; shines sit at the sides of paths and tracks, while woodlands, gardens and water features bring everything together. This approach encourages visitors are encouraged to explore widely, increasing the opportunities to encounter local members of the various communities.
A subtle aspect to the region is the use of cushions. These can be found scattered across the public areas, but rather than for sitting, they are in fact a networked teleport system, allowing you to hop around various locations, including the Sky Dojo and theatre. To use them, simply right-click and sit, and you’ll be presented with a menu of destinations – although for the most part, I recommend letting shanks’ pony take the strain, it will bring you just as easily to the temples and shrine, as well as some of the more unusual parts of the region – such as the haunted forest.
There are perhaps one or two incongruous elements to Little Yoshiwara; a helicopter parked in the garden of an Edo period house caught me a little off-guard, and there is also a resident’s airport up in the sky (group rezzing of vehicles only). but while surprising at first glance, these speak to the all-embracing nature of Little Yoshiwara as a community; something further reflected in the modern dance / event area.
As noted towards the top of this piece, role-play does take place in the region, but visitors are neither required to join-in or to wear period costume; all that’s asked is a respect for private residences, and an openness to discovering and learning about old Japanese culture.
There are a number of activities to be found throughout the town, although some may require group membership (such as the archery, which I tried, but was unable to rez my arrows whilst attempting to shoot). Even so, with its many places to sit and relax, contemplate things spiritual, its many paths and locations, Little Yoshiwara makes for an enjoyable and engaging visit.
Tuesday, August 23rd was not a particularly good day for Second Life, with an extended period of unscheduled maintenance with log-ins suspended and those in-world advised to refraining from rezzing No Copy objects, or making any LindeX related transactions, etc.
At the time of the problem, there was speculation that it might be due to further issues with the central database node (and kudos for Caitlyn for suggesting this 🙂 ). Writing in a Tools and Technology blog post on August 24th, Operations Team lead April Linden confirmed this was in fact the case:
Shortly after 10:30am [PDT], the master node of one of the central databases crashed. This is the same type of crash we’ve experienced before, and we handled it in the same way. We shut down a lot of services (including logins) so we could bring services back up in an orderly manner, and then promptly selected a new master and promoted it up the chain. This took roughly an hour, as it usually does.
Given this has happened in the relatively recent past (see here and here), the Ops Team are getting pretty good with handling these situations. Except this time there was a slight wrinkle in the proceedings. The previous failures had occurred when concurrency was relatively low due to the times they occurred. This time, however, the problem hit when rather a lot of people were trying to get into SL, so as April notes:
A few minutes before 11:30am [PDT] we started the process of restoring all services to the Grid. When we enabled logins, we did it in our usual method – turning on about half of the servers at once. Normally this works out as a throttle pretty well, but in this case, we were well into a very busy part of the day. Demand to login was very high, and the number of Residents trying to log in at once was more than the new master database node could handle.
Around noon we made the call to close off logins again and allow the system to cool off. While we were waiting for things to settle down we did some digging to try to figure out what was unique about this failure, and what we’ll need to do to prevent it next time.
It wasn’t actually until a third attempt was made to bring up the login hosts one at time that things ran smoothly, with services being fully restored at around 2:30pm PDT.
Now, as April notes, she and her team have a new challenge to deal with: understanding why they had to turn the login servers back on much more slowly than in the past. There is, however, a bright spot in all this: the work put into making the Grid Status feed more resilient paid off, with the service appearing to cope with the load placed on it by several thousand people trying to discover what was going on.
None of us like it when the go wrong, but it’s impossible for SL to be all plain sailing. What is always useful is not only being kept informed about what is going on when things do get messed up (and don’t forget, if you’re on Twitter you can also get grid status updates there as well), but in also being given the opportunity to understand why things went wrong after the fact.
In this respect, April’s blog posts are always most welcome, and continue to be an informative read, helping anyone who does so just what a complicated beast Second life is, and how hard the Lab actually does work to try to keep it running smoothly for all of us – and to get on top of this as quickly as they can when things do go wrong.
The Second Life Marketplace is both a convenience and a pain. Convenience because it provides an ease of selling / buying to users. Pain because its sheer size can make it difficult to effectively police, leaving it open to various forms of abuse.
However, Strawberry Singh has highlighted one area of concern content creators are facing, and has asked for people to pass the word on.
In Full Perm Marketplace Scams,Strawberry points to the abuse of full permission items content creators make available on the Marketplace. Typically, these items are offered individually or in kits as templates for people to re-use in their own creations, and they generally come with an end-user licence agreement (EULA) specifying their intended use. More often than not, these EULAs forbid the re-sale of such items on an “as is” basis and / or re-sale as full permission items. And if a dedicated EULA isn’t offered, the fact that the items are not intended for full perm resale can generally be found in the listing description.
However, there are unscrupulous individuals doing just that: purchasing the items and reselling them unchanged, as full permission items, thus violating the original creator’s intent and licensing. To add insult to injury, the items undercut the original creator’s own market price.
To help raise awareness of the problem, Strawberry offers some advice on how to identify or avoid such items:
Before purchasing look at the seller’s other listings. If there is a hodgepodge of brand names and the vendors all look different, they are most likely an illegal seller.
Purchase the items from the in-world store of the full perm creator instead of the marketplace, to ensure that you are not purchasing from an illegal seller.
Most of the illegal sellers have blank profiles. Real full perm sellers usually have a full profile filled with links to their websites, main stores and marketplace stores.
Most Full Perm sellers have started using water marks on the vendor ads which say the name of the avatar that is supposed to be selling it. The illegal sellers are still using those ads, even with the watermark. So it is important to look at the name of the creator on the watermark, and if it isn’t that person selling it, don’t buy it.
Try to find a way to report these items, either to Linden Lab by flagging the listing or to the original creator of the items.
It’s sound advice for anyone looking at full permission items. I’d perhaps only expand a little on point (5.) for clarity. While we may grumble about the DMCA process, it is the means by which such items can be most effectively removed from the Marketplace, as the nature of DMCA filings requires that Linden Lab respond to them accordingly.
So, if you believe an item on the Marketplace is being illegally sold and can identify, or are aware of the original creator, do be sure to contact them directly and make them aware of your concern. Provide information on the item: where it can be found (listing, etc.), so that they might investigate for themselves, and if necessary, file a DMCA. This approach not only helps the creator take the required action to have violating listings removed, it also potentially helps to establish a history of violations which they can also put to the Lab, if necessary, which might in turn encourage the Lab to take more stringent action against repeat offenders.
Update: August 16th: Merchants have been reporting a number of reported issues with the new search tool. The Lab has set-up a forum thread for general discussions on issues and problems. If you are experiencing issues with the new MP search, please join the discussion on the forum thread.
If you are noting specific issues which appear to be bugs, the Lab requests you add details to BUG-37670.When doing so, please provide the following: Affected Field: (Demo linking, Related Items, Quick Fill, etc.); Name of Product you are editing: (What is the name of, or link to, the item listing that you are trying to add a demo or related item); Search Term: (What is the exact search term you have entered to try to locate the Demo, Related, or Quick Fill Template); and if possible, provide a screenshot showing the empty search return showing the search text and the lack of results. The exception to this is “Adult rated items that contain profanity”.
First issued as a beta test in November 2015, the updated search has been undergoing refinement and improvement (and bug fixing!) since then, hence why it has taken some time to reach a release status.
The new search mechanism is designed to address some of the shortfalls inherent in searching for listings and products on the Marketplace, which can often by a frustrating and time-consuming, as anyone who has used it will be able to attest.
To achieve this, it is said to be a complete step away from the older infrastructure supporting Marketplace search, with the new system hopefully being faster and more robust. In particular, the Lab point to it having a learning algorithm intended to improve search results over time – essentially, the more search is used, the better it performs. The new search also supports the use of boolean operators – AND, OR, NOT – so users can hopefully set-up more focused search criteria.
During testing, the Lab took feedback from merchants and users into account, using it to further refine and improve the new system. This obviously doesn’t mean it is flawless, but the hope is the overall experience will be improved, and will continue to improve over time. Should anyone encounter significant bugs or issues, they are asked to file a bug report. There is also a pinned Commerce Forum thread where general discussions might be continued.
The new Gaming Islands – designed to introduce Second life users to Skill Gaming
In a blog post on August 2nd, 2016, the Lab introduced their new Gaming Islands: regions designed to help Second Life users – particularly (but not exclusively), I would assume, new users – understand Skill Games in the platform, how they can play them (and why they may not be able to play them), together with a means to find them.
I’m not sure when these regions – there appear to be two at present – opened, so whether the blog post has been timed to coincide with their launch or whether, like much that is in the blog post, they’ve been around a while but simply not promoted, is hard to tell. However, on reading about them, I jumped over to take a look – but before I get into the details, a quick bit of background.
The Social Islands provide a dedicated teleport portal to the Gaming Islands for new users; established users can reach them via the Portal Parks
Gambling laws in the USA and around the world can be complicated beasts. What some might consider to be gambling to others might be viewed a game of skill, and vice-versa. This makes determining what is and isn’t allowed and by whom a difficult practice, particularly where the Internet is concerned.
Because of all this complexity, the Lab banned gambling in Second Life, whilst allowing games of skill to remain. Then, in 2014, the Lab sought to further refine the kinds of skill games involving money and payouts which are permissible in SL through a complete overhaul of their Skill Gaming Policy, together with the introduction of new Skill Gaming regions where such games can be played.
The new Gaming Islands are designed to help SL residents understand what Skill Games are, where they can be played, the kinds of games they might encounter, how they can get to play them – and why, in some instances, they may not be allowed to access the regions where they can be played, and finally to offer a means to reach Skill Gaming regions.
To achieve this, the new Gaming Islands are split into four areas: the arrival point, a game play area; a Learn area which explains more about Skill Games in SL and how to access Skill Gaming Regions; and an Explore area which provides direct teleport portals to Skill Gaming regions provided by various in-world Skill Gaming Operators.
The game play area offers what appear to be “skill-based slot machine” games (yes, there are such beasts in the physical world) with L$ pay-outs – although I have to admit, even after reading the instructions, I was unable to determine where the “skill” factor came into effect over and above the “chance” element (the requirement for Skill Games in SL is that their outcome “is determined by skill and is not contingent, in whole or in material part, upon chance”).
This is not to say that I think the games are not skill-based, but simply that – as a non-gambler / player of skill games, I simply didn’t get where skill enters into them, even after reading the instruction tabs. Perhaps this might indicate more practical explanations are required, or maybe it just indicates I just don’t get Skill Games. I’m also a little mystified as to why, more than an hour after I left one of the islands, the GamingIsland Operator made a small payment to my account – but hey-ho (addendum: apparently pay-outs are made at regular periods after play).
Gaming Islands: Learn area – discover more about Skill Gaming and how to access Skill Gaming regions in SL
The Learn area, designed to get people up-to-speed with Skill Gaming in SL, how they can ensure they are eligible to access Skill Gaming regions and why, even if they meet the SL criteria, they may still be unable to do so, is a little more straightforward.
To one side of the are a series of information boards designed to help people ensure they can access Skill Gaming region; on the other are explanations of what Lab’s define a Skill Game (lifted from the Second Life Skill Gaming FAQ), together with information on why, legally, some SL users may not be able to access Skill Gaming regions even if they meet the SL criteria for doing so. The split path perhaps isn’t the best approach here, given it might encourage some to simply go around one side and then up the stairs to the final section, but the use of teleport boards in the final section makes this a minor quibble.
Gaming Islands: a more detailed look at a couple of the Learn area info boards, which explain what is required to enter Skill Gaming regions (step-by-step instructions to meet the requirements are provided on the other side of the area), and why, even if the SL criteria are met, some users may still not be allowed to access the regions
This final section, entitled Explore, offers teleport portal directly to a number of Skill Gaming regions provided by different Skill Gaming Operators. Should anyone find they cannot use the teleport portal, boards between the portals will teleport them to the Learn section of the island where they can double-check they meet the SL / legal (in the case of US residents) requirements for accessing Skill Gaming regions.
Gaming Islands: the Explore section with teleport portals
Skill Gaming isn’t to everyone’s interest, to be sure. However, providing information on what it is and how to find it is, I would suggest, a good idea, as is joining the dots for new users to be able to find their way to such regions, which give the opportunity to play for Linden Dollars. As it is, Skill Gaming operators pay a premium for their regions, and so providing a means by which they can obtain traffic on the same footing as other types of activity in SL is only fair.
In terms of the Gaming Islands layout, and my own problems in “getting” the games aside, the design is straightforward and does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Which is all one can ask, really.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 